“Midnight.

“I have been reading Grimm’s Correspondence.  He repeats frequently, in speaking of a poet, or a man of genius in any department, even in music, (Gretry, for instance,) that he must have ’une ame qui se tourmente, un esprit violent.’  How far this may be true, I know not; but if it were, I should be a poet ‘per eccellenza;’ for I have always had ‘une ame,’ which not only tormented itself but every body else in contact with it; and an ‘esprit violent,’ which has almost left me without any ‘esprit’ at all.  As to defining what a poet should be, it is not worth while, for what are they worth? what have they done?

“Grimm, however, is an excellent critic and literary historian.  His Correspondence form the annals of the literary part of that age of France, with much of her politics; and, still more, of her ’way of life.’  He is as valuable, and far more entertaining than Muratori or Tiraboschi—­I had almost said, than Ginguene—­but there we should pause.  However, ’tis a great man in its line.

“Monsieur St. Lambert has

    “’Et lorsqu’a ses regards la lumiere est ravie,
    Il n’a plus, en mourant, a perdre que la vie.’

This is, word for word, Thomson’s

    “‘And dying, all we can resign is breath,’

without the smallest acknowledgment from the Lorrainer of a poet.  M. St. Lambert is dead as a man, and (for any thing I know to the contrary) damned, as a poet, by this time.  However, his Seasons have good things, and, it may be, some of his own.

“February 2. 1821

“I have been considering what can be the reason why I always wake, at a certain hour in the morning, and always in very bad spirits—­I may say, in actual despair and despondency, in all respects—­even of that which pleased me over night.  In about an hour or two, this goes off, and I compose either to sleep again, or, at least, to quiet.  In England, five years ago, I had the same kind of hypochondria, but accompanied with so violent a thirst that I have drank as many as fifteen bottles of soda-water in one night, after going to bed, and been still thirsty—­calculating, however, some lost from the bursting out and effervescence and over-flowing of the soda-water, in drawing the corks, or striking off the necks of the bottles from mere thirsty impatience.  At present, I have not the thirst; but the depression of spirits is no less violent.

“I read in Edgeworth’s Memoirs of something similar (except that his thirst expended itself on small beer) in the case of Sir F.B.  Delaval;—­but then he was, at least, twenty years older.  What is it?—­liver?  In England, Le Man (the apothecary) cured me of the thirst in three days, and it had lasted as many years.  I suppose that it is all hypochondria.

“What I feel most growing upon me are laziness, and a disrelish more powerful than indifference.  It I rouse, it is into fury.  I presume that I shall end (if not earlier by accident, or some such termination) like Swift—­’dying at top.’  I confess I do not contemplate this with so much horror as he apparently did for some years before it happened.  But Swift had hardly begun life at the very period (thirty-three) when I feel quite an old sort of feel.